SEO Marketing: Site Structure

By James Atkinson, LLB

SEO Marketing - Site Structure: This series of articles is about structuring your website so that it can properly indicate to search engines what your site is about.

Search engine ‘bots’ visit web sites all over the internet. They do so to find out whether a site’s content is relevant to searcher keyword queries. All sites visited are assessed and placed in a ‘rankings’ hierarchy.

The bots are easily distracted and ‘confused’. They visit with very clear instructions as to how they should “spider” your site. When they report back to their search engine masters your site is evaluated and ranked.

The search engine algorithms will not consider your site to be 100% relevant to your topic if there is a ‘theme bleeding’. Theme bleeding is a major reason why good sites don’t achieve high rankings.

The best way to avoid theme bleeding is to silo your site.

Siloing ensures that your themes are 100% clear to the search engines. Once the search engines consider you highly relevant to your themes, your job of ranking high becomes much easier. In addition, you must structure your site using keywords as the connective sinews that bind the whole structure together.

The Structure of a Siloed Site

Silos are the building blocks of your site. But how do you put them together to form a fully optimized themed web site?

Well, first of all you need to keep themed silos separated:

Let’s say you want to build a site about gardening. You will want to rank high for many gardening-related keywords. Your goal is to make the search engines consider you 100% relevant to the theme of gardening.

In order to do this, you need to cover the gardening theme more comprehensively than your competitors. Your site must be organized hierarchically, moving from broad to specific themes.

This helps the search engines understand that you are covering your topic comprehensively and in a well-organized way.

The search engine will compare you with high-ranking gardening web sites to determine whether you use the same expert vocabulary mix of relevant keywords and phrases that is commonly used in the context of gardening.

Your themed and siloed site shows the search engines that you are a gardening expert who deserves to rank high on lots of gardening-related keywords.

Let’s look at the building blocks of a well-optimized siloed site. I’ll go into more detail later, but for now just understand the basic ideas.

This is the foundation for siloing your site and covering your themes authoritatively. You should note that the system outlined in this series is only ONE way of optimizing your website. There are many different ways the same result can be achieved - but this is the easiest to implement.